The Nethernet, a browser-based game formerly known as PMOG was an innovative attempt to make the whole internet a virtual playground where people could interact passively during their normal use. As a concept I found it brilliant and I blogged about it when I first started using it as I thought it had a lot of potential to spread ideas around while being fun.

However I soon stopped using it as the experience was very buggy on a GNU/Linux system and it was having very infrequent updates, not enough features to make it more addictive and it just couldn’t keep my interest (although that’s nothing new, WoW couldn’t keep my interest either.) Nevertheless, I had subscribed to their official blog to keep abreast of their progress and hopefully jump in at some point when it would be more fully fledged. And in fact I did, just a few days ago, shortly after the Nethernet toolbar finally hit version 1.0.0.

Well to my surprise, today my RSS reader brought up the post announcing the end of the Nethernet, ironically called “The Nethernet Moving Forward”. In short, The Nethernet is being shut down because of the very high costs associated with hosting and developing it. While the shutting down news came as a bit of a surprise, seeing as there was no warning at all and everything seemed to be like business as usual until the weekend, the ongoing troubles they were having with bandwidth were noted while their sudden and heavy handed attempt to introduce micro-payments were an obvious display of their monetary troubles.

Personally I smell the investor’s hand in this. Gamelayers and the Nethernet was quite a bit backed by venture capitalists and their board of directors is practically run by them. As such, it was a matter of time before a resource-heavy game that failed to find a business plan to monetize all their traffic would start to raise questions about its viability by the investors. My impression is that the developers were given an ultimatum on this by their investors: “Either find a way to make money out of this within the next month or we stop funding you.” Or something to that extent. As such we saw the wholly misguided attempt to introduce “bacon” (ie micropayments) to the game which had the effect of driving a very considerable number of the community away (Just look at the comments on their post about it).

And now, almost exactly one month later, once it became obvious that their community abandoned them (or once a deadline was crossed?) the plug is pulled. The question is, what now? I mean, it’s obvious that the hosting won’t continue for much longer by Gamelayers (possibly until their server leasing expires?) so at some point the Nethernet will go 503.

But what happens to the assets? Personally I think it would be a shame to simply lose all this effort in code and artwork and I think the very best idea would be to simply open source the source of the servers and the firefox extension (if it isn’t already) and allow people to possibly find a way to continue with it. It obvious from the developers’ point of view that they’re not going to be working on the game any time soon so why let it go to waste.

What I did find interesting as well was the number of people who suggested the exact same thing in the fora, before I even came around to add my own voice. There were at least 5-6 different people suggesting an open sourcing of the game which just goes to show how mainstream the idea of free software has already become. But I digress…

But if the costs were too high for gamelayers, why would a free software adaptation of it be possible? Well because the code might be modified so that the resource use becomes distributed. I think the biggest mistake of Gamelayers was their protective and secretive nature on all things related to The Nethernet, even up to and including the announcement of the shutdown that came as a surprise even to some of the most valued members of their community. If they had allowed far more crowdsourcing of various aspects of the game, (eg: badge creation), perhaps this unfortunate fate might have been avoided.

But where Gamelayers failed, perhaps the community driven creativity, from players, for players, might make the Nethernet what it could have been. I can only imagine solutions such as federated servers, each of them possible to be hosted by any person’s desktop, sharing resources to allow the game to run smoothly. A team of free software programmers simply coding in the tools that people really want to have, that will make the game far more immersive and exciting, instead of the semi-boring event it is now. And by the nature of Free Software, you might see other versions of the Nethernet spring up, based on different universes rather than the same Victorian Steampunk one PMOG was always based on, again connected via distributed computing.

The possibilities are always there, but it is the curse of closed source initiatives to be always be based on the limited perspective of the developers, rather than opening up to the creativity of people “scratching their own itch”. Lets all hope that in the end, they will at least do the right thing and release the code under the AGPL as Nethernet’s last hurrah.

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Paulcasals

Pathmaker? Imagine the possibilities if pmog could be run by the players. Although some people worry about it being able to hack it easily and cheat one's way to the top of a class, I say – "So what"? I think that that'd even make the game *more fun, to have some players who can spice things up a bit. The thing is, if pmog were to be openware, we'd need a leader; perhaps a steward? PS – wow, it's amazing not having to see an "ERROR" after posting!

http://intensedebate.com/people/db0 db0

All Free Software projects have a person or a group of people leading them, usually the main developers so there's not going to be a lot of difference there. And hacking can be prevented in various ways, such as people marking servers as hacked, or using md5 hashes to make sure federated servers run the same version of the SW. Many free software games managed to have a healthy multiplayer without large problems from cheating.

Chetyre

I have to agree with what you said about keeping the community in the dark. I feel like this was one of the biggest issues, and the sad thing is I doubt that they learned anything from this experience. Even as a Steward, we were often not told things, or given a heads up and hour before "Oh by the way, server maintenance again today". When Joe (burdenday) was let go, this got even worse. Really, I think Joe getting the boot was the beginning of the end.

I volunteered helping out keep the forums clean, keeping IRC clean, helping out new players, and they even dumped the "Characters" (Bloody_Tuesday, etc) on the Stewards after they let octalblack go. I put a lot of time into trying to help GameLayers with their game because quite frankly it's one of the most interesting ideas I've ever seen for a game. It just sucks that it had to be run so poorly. I've met a lot of great people through pmog…it honestly had one of the best communities I've seen in an online game. It's really sad to just see it end like this.

By the way, if you ever wish to stop by oldschool pmog irc is still up–server irc.freenode.net channel #pmog.

http://intensedebate.com/people/db0 db0

Yep. It did feel to me as well as if the developers were living sort of in their own ivory tower. I felt the same way when I was active at the start and trying to improve the game. The way you say it, it does seem as if they had already given up on the game internally which explains the lack of enthusiasm from their part.

Nevertheless, even if Gamelayers declines to open source the code, I do believe that the idea is solid, and all of us which liked should try to start something new, free (as in freedom) that is not subject to such issues (bandwidth or leadership)

http://www.sikkdays.com sikkdays dot com

Well said. It will be interesting to see if something better will spawn from this.

Thanks matey. I always found that my WP-Likes plugin was weak. This looks exactly like what I wanted.

Spikeyboy

Wotcha. You were pretty much spot-on, I'd say.

I think that things were going bad when they dropped the surfing badges, the ones that encouraged you to visit certain sites. After all, this was going to represent a good proportion of the income.
When they dropped those badges due to bug issues, I immediately thought they were trying to push things to far, too fast. But that was how it seemed all the way – introduce something else before cleaning up what's there already.

WhoIsNumberSix

I remember my father gathering up this excellent team of workers and altho I don't have the knack, I still sitting pretty because of it.
I suggested in the forums that this was a goldmine to anyone studying peace-and-war issues (there is even a dept. at UCBerkeley to go and see if you could get grant money for it) or economic issues (before bacon) of virtual money, barter, etc. that someone might be willing to use PMOG as a focus group and study player interactions.
I'd never gotten around to it, but making Missions with appurtenant Portals was exactly like doing an internet (vs. books and magazines) based university paper; GameLayers missed a chance in trying to have any forward thinking University take up the Gauntlet.
Pity it seems, for the nonce, too late now.

http://kairubyte.com KairuByte

I actually rather like the idea of a distributed system. Get a couple dedicated, user donated servers that simply distribute the load over one thousand (or more) desktop systems running specific software (Like can be done with some research systems), and you can easily host it for free, or very little. It would take smart programming, but it would work.

The real question is who is willing to take on such a task.

http://intensedebate.com/people/db0 db0

That is in fact the million dollar question :-/

http://www.facebook.com/Sketaful Mikael Guggenheim

I agree with you, they should release the code. I will miss creating "missions". It was a wonderful way of sharing good sites and information. I really don't care much of the "gameing" thought. But since we're all different I can imagine there are people that didn't care much of the mission-making and rather dropped mines on homepages

I like your blog and the way you write so you prob have to live with me visiting daily